Submit video questions for December 2009

It’s that time again! Tomorrow afternoon I’ll record some new videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post questions or suggestions and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every single question, but I’ll tackle several popular questions plus a few interesting questions. Please ask questions that lots of people would be interested in, not just questions about a specific site. If you can ask about a topic that requires more in-depth answers, that would probably make the videos more interesting too.

The suggestions for videos don’t have to be about search/SEO. I really enjoyed doing the barcode scanning video, for example. So I’d love to tackle a few more general questions like “Do you have power tips for crunching through email quickly?” or “What Chrome extension would you like to see?” I’m happy to tackle some broad questions like “Do you have any predictions for 2010?” Post some interesting topics and we’ll see which ones we can tackle. Thanks!

If you run a bunch of unrelated sites and want to use a single, separate domain purely to host the assets for amongst them, does Google care, or factor that into any equations..? Can it have a negative impact..?

Duplicate content in local webshops & problems with showing prices.
I work for a webshop that is active in the European market and we have a typical problem that all webshops in this market face: to be locally relevant in search and for the perception of our potential customers, we have TLD’s for several countries (domain name extensions per country) and for others we use subdomains. But since we sell about the same products in several countries and since there are several languages similar in several countries, we face problems with duplicate content. We started our business in Belgium in Dutch, this website is doing fine and has a sustainable amount of natural traffic from search engines. But the copied website on the .nl domain has instable rankings in Google. The number of indexed pages is clearly smaller and we face competition of our .be pages in rankings in google.nl. We are now rewriting the content, meta data & titles to get rid of this problem. By rewriting the content we mean: replace some words by synonyms, change the order of the sentences & paragraphs and emphasis other words in bold.
Apart from the problem with duplicate content, we face problems with showing prices. In some countries we have local presence and for this countries we can charge local VAT to local customers. This means that customers will find different prices on the different domains due to different VAT percentages. Since we sell B2C it is required to publish prices inclusive VAT. We use visitors IP’s to determine their country which allows us to show the appropriate currency.

I have some questions on these matters:
– Will our action of rewriting the content as described above be enough to be seen as different content?
– Is there a percentage of similarity in content that is acceptable?
– Any tips on how to localize content?
– What with our +50.000 product detail pages? Do we use a canonical tag on the subdomains or a “nofollow,noindex”-tag to avoid duplicate content?
– What will be the effect of local hosting? (now all websites are hosted on the same server)?
– We are looking for a non-IP-based (since not 100% reliable) solution to show the right price to the right visitor (right VAT percentage included depending on the visitors origin). Anyone suggestions on this?
– When Googlebot indexes our pages, it is seen as an American visitor and prices appear in the cache in dollars. Even in the local Google searches. Is there a “non-black hat” solution to solve this?
I use an example to explain what we think is a solution: In Europe a lot of people speak e.g. German: in Germany, in Suisse, in Hungary,… We have a website in German with a .de domain. This site will be indexed. We will have another copy with about the same content on several subdomains. For Suisse: ch.domain.com/de, for Hungaria: hu.domain.com/de, … . On the pages of the subdomains that are duplicated, we would put a “noindex,nofollow”-tag. People coming for natural search speaking German, will find the German website, that IP based, will define the country of the visitor and request the visitor to change to his country website. Some big brands are using this solution. We are wondering of this will be the best solution.
Thanks Matt, for taking our question in consideration.
Annelies

If you use Google XML sitemaps, they might prevent you discovering a serious indexing barrier on your website. As a webmaster you think your website is ok because all your pages are getting indexed. But it’s the use of Google CML sitemaps that causes the entire website to be indexed, not a well structured website that is 100% crawlable by googlebot.

Now my questions are:
– Pages that have no real links, only a Google XML sitemap link, will they still add PageRank to the website where they reside? If you look at the known PageRank algorithm, they will not.

– Good internal anchor texts can help googlebot determine what internal pages on a website is about, but pages that have no real link, only a Google XML sitemap link, they do not have that option, thus they will not be as valuable as normal pages, all other factors being equal.

I’ve logged my question on Google Moderator – but it was really quite hard to explain in the character limit – so I’d add a full explanation here.

As part of my site, I have a geographic search where people can find a meeting close to them. The standard search results page shows the 5 closest matches in a list, but also a Google Map centered on the search location – but also has every other UK group on there so that they can move around / zoom out etc. to find something else relevant to them.

The problem comes because the HTML generated includes two lists:
– A containing all UK groups (This is then parsed by Javascript to create a GoogleMap for clients that support JS – giving a nice fallback to the DL for clients that don’t)
– A containing the 5 local matches

This results in Googlebot seeing the list of all UK groups on every page and thinking the pages are duplicate content. Ideally I’d hide the DL entirely for Googlebot – but I’m worried that doing that might make things even worse!

Would love to hear your thoughts on this – I can send a link if that’s useful

Hi Matt, can you explain me how search result will be throw by data center. Results are periodically shown by data center wise or it depends on the page value or wat?. Because i have one keyword it shows on 8th position in one days and the same will shown 11th position on someother day but tat keyword will retain this two position only for more dan six month. Why this fluctuation has happen??

In our html, should we put our main content div’s at the top so the spiders can grab the main part of the page first, rather than the navigations (big or small), booking forms, sign ups first? Then using CSS to show the page to the user as expects. Or stick to standards, semantic structure.

Google Moderator is still weak. I voted on every question, submitted two of my own, and got a pop-up saying they looked similar to other questions submitted. The only similarity I saw is that I used “Google” in them.

BTW, sorry they were search related, but that’s kind of why I read you, no offence intended:-)

What’s your advice regarding Google’s indexation cap Rand Fishkin blogged about on SEOmoz? How does this effect e-commerce based websites that specialize in ranking with long tail detail pages? Do we need to worry this might be(come) a long tail killer?

Let’s say I have a great incoming link from an authority website and I don’t want to link back to them, in order to prevent Google seeing it as a reciprocal link. Can I then just make the link to the authoritysite on my own site unfollowed ? Will Google now not see it as a reciprocal link and thus give me more linkjuice from the authority site ?

Hi Matt, This seems like a great idea providing support in an application such as Google Moderator. Very cool! Perhaps I will also post a question or 2. Will this be an ongoing area for regular questions, or just a one-off?

I tried to post this on your Google Moderator app and it said there were questions that were too similar. But there were no questions that specifically asked my question so I will indulge and post it here.

Why does Webmaster Tools refuse to index a sitemap with subdomains that are CNAME mapped to Google Sites? Our sitemap is here > http://bit.ly/7GL8hj Yes, we tried .xml as well.

I was wondering what your advice you have on site-wide footer links i.e. “Site powered by ABC” or “Site designed by company XYZ”. Is this best practice for SEO or would a dedicated page in the “About us” section of a site with more context be a better fit? A lot of studies have shown that very few people ever click footer links so seemingly these are only exploited for SEO purposes.

I have received conflicting advice on this and would appreciate your thoughts.

Big footers are a design trend right now. We want one for users, but don’t want the spider to crawl them as it will increase the volume of links from the pages. Would it be acceptable to iframe that block of links? As nofollowing them, just seems spammy.

Agree, there are some challenges in submitting questions as it identifies one keyword, even if it is not related or on topic and stops your from submitting your question..at least this was my experience

In my experience, it only looks like your question is being rejected. It appears as though you are being asked to choose a preexisting question in lieu of your own question. However, it is possible to vote for your own question, which results in it being published.

What are the top three things must-haves for an e-commerce platform to rank well on Google? We are moving our website to a new platform, and are in the process of selecting it. We want to make sure we get it right ! (BTW, My guess was clean URL’s, good optimized content and simple navigation for spiders and people. Was I close?)

If your site is down when Google crawls it can it hurt your search engine ranking for a few days? Also is there a difference between a deep crawl and standard crawl? Not sure if what I was reading on line is true.

Hi Matt;
Is there anything us photobloggers should know about both Web and Images search ? how to get the best out of both (considering there’s not very much text) is it just a case of useful relevant text content along side? Do you guys use the EXIF/IPTC at all?

While you’re passing on Morris’ suggestion, you might want to suggest that certain tags (e.g. the ones WordPress allows) are allowed, since people may want to extend existing questions with a <blockquote> or have thoughts of their own.

For example (smartass example, I know, but I’m sure there are legitimate ones):

Why is Matt posting questions that he intends to answer himself?

“Do you want to make any predictions for 2010?”
Matt Cutts, Bay Area, California

Anything in the blockquote could be taken as “something’s being quoted, so don’t factor that in as part of the similar stuff.

I see two 404 crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools. One of the links shows inbound links of 0. Another link shows 3 inbound links coming from my own site, but I checked the source of my own site and they’re not showing any links to the 404 page.

Why do Webmaster Tools show these errors? Should I try fixing them, contact Google, etc., or will it fix its self over time?

This is something I’ve been waiting for for a while. I know that Google had to offset a lot of AdWords phone support to go online (from demand, I’m guessing), so I’m hoping that the flood of questions you get through this won’t dissuade you from keeping an actual human response available. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to see what Matt Cutts has to say about several issues that come from the public.

Web designers often put alink in the footer like “website by [company]”. 3 questions. As a web designer does it help rankings? As a client do they hurt rankings? I’ve also seen that these should be nofollowed. Is that true?

I would love to know why I see big jumps in google rankings on many of my sites that I manage. These are all different and non related other then they are hosted with the same carrier. These jumps seem to happen weekly and the movement up and down always seems to be about the same. Is this testing for Googles new search methods?

A good thing to be heard is to listen, please post questions on the moderator page, some of this questions might be valuable for some people, but why wait for answers if don;t know how to proceed with a simple task of asking on the moderator page?

i hope you will talk about the problem A. Frison described.
I think there is a similar question on the google moderator page, unfortunately not voted very popular. But this is a serious problem for many european webmasters. I´m from Austria and we have have the same problem with Germany and Switzerland – especially for showing the correct currency (CHF) for Switzerland.

First he says Google cares about webmasters and didn’t want to stress them for the Holidays over caffeine, yet then Google turns around and decimates businesses left and right by banning them from Adwords right before the Holidays. Guess that’s less stressful.

What is the big deal with caffeine anyway, now that Google has opted everybody into personalized search whether they wanted it or not, what difference does it make. Google is going to show you what they want to show.

And, what about that “Do no evil mantra”? Did somebody forget about that nice little statement or has it now been modified to “Do more an evil than anybody else has ever done because we know what’s good for you and we now have the money to do it”?

Sorry, but the great Google is showing its true colors.

How about a video on how Google has totally taken webmasters who have been loyal to them for years and just tossed them aside like yesterdays garbage?

Matt, thanks so much for the site performance tools both in webmaster tools and the firebug plug in. I did not realize that images took so long to load. I really learned a lot about cache, Apache, java script, css, and parallel processing across host names. I am sure my visitors will appreciate the boost in speed as well.
I wondered if adsense would be having a new faster format? I noticed that the code really slowed my site down. I also used a Google api for serving search results and found that it produced another huge bottleneck. I now now that objects produce about 80% of website latency and try to keep them under 10 wherever possible.
However, this performance protocol does make it very trying to incorporate web 2.0 applications. i am working on reworking a comment script into a live blog but is object heavy and requires a huge chunk of js (like jquery,smarkup, etc…) which cannot be parallel processed across domain names. I had to start over so now I am starting from scracth combining js in load order (much harder then php apparently order and variable declaration order matters! lol 🙂
I am far from done but appreciate the nudge in the right direction; in conjunction with the free tools to accomplish the task. Happy Holidays! (I hope) See you next year (I hope)

Firstly, I just want to say thanks for giving everyone the opportunity to ask questions, you have some really good questions I’m waiting to be answered! 🙂

Secondly, I wanted to ask why Google doesn’t give a quick personal response to reconsideration requests, well..more specifically after the 5th reconsideration in a 30 day period. I can understand that the Google team must be very busy, however when you respond to reconsideration requests, it would be great if the “reviewer” could simply tick a box with some general comments to help the webmaster. For example “This site comes across too spammy” or “this site may have been hacked” or “this site has duplicate content” etc.

I ask because I have gone through the Guidelines and I can not think of any reason why I may have a penalty, and if you have found something that I don’t know about, wouldn’t Google rather the problem to be fixed, rather than waiting for the webmaster to figure out the problem, which could take months after multiple reconsideration requests.

On Nov. 17, 2009 Google erroneously tagged my site “Living Fit, Healthy and Happy” a SPAM site. After repeated requests to you people to remove it (all met with silence) even after going through the restore process, I moved my site ti a different server. My site never was a spam blog, the tag was insulting. On Wednesday December 9, 2009 I now see a visit from you Google abuse spam bots TROLLING my site even though it is no longer even hosted by Google! Get off my site! And stay off!

I dont want to pester you and I dont want to HAVE to write this here, but I am afraid that im left with no choice. 🙁

I have sent 7 reconsideration requests now and I have checked all the guidelines and I still have a penalty. Can you please possibly let me know if you plan to permanently penalize my site so atleast I can cancel my hosting and take the site down. This would save your bandwidth and crawling resources (its a large site) and also save me time and money.

I have abided by the guidelines and I can not think of any reason as for the penalty, as explained in my previous recons. I hate to have to write this here as I sure you hate reading posts about specific sites however I have been very polite and patient in my recons asking for a quick response, but have not got any feedback.

If my site is doing something wrong, please let me know and ill get it fixed, if Google doesnt like my site and plans to penalize me forever, please also let me know so we can both save bandwidth and resources.

Sorry again for this post but I honestly dont know what else to do. I hope you can see the positive of this post and not “just another site specific post”.

Mike, don’t waste your energy. Matt doesn’t bother addressing individual sites, no matter how you ask the question, unless you pay to attend one of the spamfests known as SEO conferences.

Your problem is actually pretty simple, though…your site is an affiliate site. Google doesn’t like those very much, because people tend not to as well. They don’t generally offer a lot of value and there are about a million of them out there.

They also form competitors to this thing, and from a strictly capitalist standpoint there isn’t a reason for Google to even put other shopping portals on an even playing field with their own.

So if you put your site up looking to draw affiliate revenue as a result of Google searches, you might as well save yourself the bandwidth and time and come up with something else.

Yeah, I know what your saying and agree in a way, however Google does state in their guidelines that “there is nothing wrong with having an affiliate site as long as you offer something else too, for example reviews and ratings etc” which I do, I have had thousands of visitors rate products and merchants and I have explained this to Google, I also offer price comparisons.

There are other sites like mine that perform really well and are just covered in ads etc. I do not want to out perform other quality sites as I believe that quality comes first, however I dont believe that an outright penalty of this nature is deserved. People do find my site useful and people do rate and review products etc. I can understand if my pages get filtered in some way to allow for better pages to be displayed first, but its almost like a ban i have got. Either Google is being “unfair” or something else has caused this penalty.

As I proposed the system that Google named Webmaster Console on this place some years ago
I hoped that they will develop a system were we can announce and handle our links properly
and it should become a base of 2-way communication for all the problems we have with Google’s Ranking

today I am too ill to hope they would accept more than this one link that you will find:

Link:www.light2art.de

unchanged for 4 years so that only this one link counts.

Google ever said to us: look at our rules

but were are the rules that Google had to recognize?

As MW Adam said here will be no help for little people

because they do not care about your one “midget “ problem

you should only help them or hear what they command

As long as all the normals think,

that Google is more than the people that delivers the contend

you are nothing to them at all!

on Your side Mike are:

no document type declaration and 129 more faults only on the starting page

at Light2Art you may find a dozen faults at 1500 pages by 2 GB content

and most of them are inevitable

Either Google is being “unfair” or something else has caused this penalty

and to all you other people here, thinking this Karl is crazy and to something else

I chatted with Abaco in 1999 and 2000 at a financial Chat

he studied aircraft construction at Hamburg Wilhemlsburg at that time

and he had friends at the Balkan war which exploded there and he said fine!

We disagree at that point, but I prophesy to him and all other that day:

this will becomes much more worsted,

because I waited for optimization at that point, like knall, bum and peng shows us a lot

and on a special moment later mid year 2000 I warned the German BND

that some one is planning to destroy a building

(I named Empire State Building as a possible target and a large Boing aircraft as the weappon)

but I am not the one they want to here at or ask the complete story

Abaco was used last at that site one week after my 50th birthday

and so I had to think to day, that the timing of what has happened

should remind me at the braw with Abaco at my 49th birthday

In the past I have had something to say that could change the world a lot

and you think this was the only time?

I made art that no one copied for a decade

after my death it will be big (if you think this is wrong, you must be blind)

Just to clarify my stance, I never said that Google took an anti-competitive stance against smaller players. What I said was that, if Google releases a product and there are competing products, they’re more likely to give preference to their own product, and with good reason…they’re not likely to take money out of their own pockets to promote the competition.

Shopping portals are one example. Google has a shopping search engine, so why would they direct users to other shopping engines? The only reason to do so would be if the engines offered features that Google’s own engine didn’t…and if that were the case, Google would be more likely to implement the missing features in their engine to remove the competitive disadvantage.

My question is simple – I spend over $90,000 a year in advertising with Google but am unable to get an answer to a question. I email and get a very generic answer. There is no phone number to contact anybody and live chat is not available where I am. i realize that I am a small fish in a big pond but it makes me look elsewhere to see where my 90,000 my work as well and be appreaciated.

Question about local vs. non-geo targeted search. I have been trying to do some research and have been unable to find any real answer. Will claiming (or creating) a listing in the LBC cause Google to think that you are a local business? i.e. if you are a nationally, non-geo targeted business, is it better not to do a local listing? There is so much info out there about local, but not a whole lot about what to do if you’re not a local business. Thanks!

Hi Matt, I have multilingual website targeted for different EU countries.
Is there any difference between
1) big .EU domain with different languages in folders or subdomains
(with target countries set in google webmaster tools)
2) multiple domains with country .tld hosted in that country
What is better? Do you put more weight on what we set in google webmaster tools or the server IP address and .tld?

I might be wrong but I think Google changed their algorithm to give more power to the total number of referring domains. So in answer to your question I think listing on 100 PR1 directories is better than 1 listing on a PR7 website. But it really isn’t as simple as that.

What’s your advice regarding Google’s indexation cap Rand Fishkin blogged about on SEOmoz? How does this effect e-commerce based websites that specialize in ranking with long tail detail pages? Do we need to worry this might be(come) a long tail killer?